Archive for the ‘comp’ Category

I read Tolkien’s “canon”, that is The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, every year about christmas. So also this year.

In chapter two of The Lord of the Rings, we find a short note on one of Bilbo Baggins’ relations, the young Angelica. Bilbo leaves her a round convex mirror as a farewell gift, and tags it with “For Angelica’s use”, and the author adds that “She was a young Baggins, and too obviously considered her face shapely”.

Now, a couple of questions arise at once: Why in Middle-earth would Bilbo own a non-flat mirror like this? Is it clown-mirror, left-over from some carneval party, or just some other old strange mathom? One might also worry about Angelica’s reaction. As a youngster, isn’t this a bit harsh from old Bilbo to tease her for her caring about her looks?

A convex looking-glass is of course a woman’s make-up mirror, as the curved surface makes it magnifying. And Bilbo being a bachelor, obviously must have inherited this from his mother, Belladonna Took. As Belladonna was of a wealthy family, and as Bilbo had taken care of her mirror for all the years after her death, it must have been quite a heirloom, and just not another mathom. I presume a frame of victorian style silver plated engravings at least.

So giving Angelica his mother’s mirror, with a tongue-in-cheek joke, would be a kind gift from old uncle Bilbo, and it was probably warmly received by her.

Modern filesystems, and even storage systems, might have built-in deduplication, but common filesystems still do not. So checking for redundant data and do deduplication when possible might save disk space.

Once up on a a time, there was a system, were we had this 6TB spool of binary files on an production ext4 filesystem, and the volume was running out of disk space. The owner of the data thought it likely that there were duplicates in the vast ammount of files, and wanted to check this up. We checked using fdupes, and yes, there were a lot of duplicates.

varnish-5.0 has configuration changes, so the updated package has been pushed to rawhide, but will not replace the ones currently in EPEL nor in Fedora stable. Those who need varnish-5.0 for EPEL may use my COPR repos at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ingvar/varnish50/. They include the varnish-5.0 and matching varnish-modules packages, and are compatible with EPEL 5, 6, and 7.

hitch-1.4.1 is configure file compatible with earlier releases, so packages for Fedora and EPEL are available in their respective repos, or will be once they trickle down to stable.

Varnish Cache is a powerful and feature rich front side web cache. It is also very fast, and that is, fast as in powered by The Dark Side of the Force. On steroids. And it is Free Software.

Redpill Linpro is the market leader for professional Open Source and Free Software solutions in the Nordics, though we have customers from all over. For professional managed services, all the way from small web apps, to massive IPv4/IPv6 multi data center media hosting, and everything through container solutions, in-house, cloud, and data center, contact us at www.redpill-linpro.com.

The World is running out of IPv4 addresses, but luckily, we have IPv6 here now, and running the whole data center on IPv6 only is not just happening, it’s becoming the standard. But what if you have an app, a daemon, or a container that actually needs IPv4 connectivity? Then you may use 464XLAT to provide an IPv4 tunnel through your IPv6 only infrastructure. clatd is one component in 464XLAT.

clatd is a CLAT / SIIT-DC Edge Relay implementation for Linux. From the github wash label:

clatd implements the CLAT component of the 464XLAT network architecture specified in RFC 6877. It allows an IPv6-only host to have IPv4 connectivity that is translated to IPv6 before being routed to an upstream PLAT (which is typically a Stateful NAT64 operated by the ISP) and there translated back to IPv4 before being routed to the IPv4 internet. This is especially useful when local applications on the host requires actual IPv4 connectivity or cannot make use of DNS64 (…) clatd may also be used to implement an SIIT-DC Edge Relay as described in RFC 7756.

Note that clatd relies on Tayga for the actual translation of packets between IPv4 and IPv6.

Redpill Linpro is the market leader for professional Open Source and Free Software solutions in the Nordics, though we have customers from all over. For professional managed services, all the way from small web apps, to massive IPv4/IPv6 multi data center media hosting, and everything through container solutions, in-house, cloud, and data center, contact us at www.redpill-linpro.com.

The Varnish Cache project recently released varnish-4.1.3 and varnish-modules-0.9.1. Of course, we want updated rpms for Fedora and EPEL.

While there are official packages for el6 and el7, I tend to like to use my Fedora downstream package, also for EPEL. So I have pushed updates for Fedora, and updated copr builds for epel5, epel6, and epel7.

An update of the official supported bundle of varnish modules, varnish-modules-0.9.1, was also released a few weeks ago. I did recently wrap it for Fedora, and am waiting for its review in BZ #1324863. Packages for epel5, epel6, and epel7 are in copr as well.

Varnish Cache is a powerful and feature rich front side web cache. It is also very fast, and that is, fast as in powered by The Dark Side of the Force. On steroids. And it is Free Software.

Redpill Linpro is the market leader for professional Open Source and Free Software solutions in the Nordics, though we have customers from all over. For professional managed services, all the way from small web apps, to massive IPv4/IPv6 multi data center media hosting, and everything through container solutions, in-house, cloud, and data center, contact us at www.redpill-linpro.com.

Hitch is a libev-based high performance SSL/TLS proxy. It is developed by Varnish Software, and may be used for adding https to Varnish cache.

hitch-1.2.0 was recently released. Among the new features in 1.2.0, might be mentioned more granular per-site configuration. Packages for Fedora and EPEL6/7 were requested for testing today. Please test and report feedback.

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Redpill Linpro is the market leader for professional Open Source and Free Software solutions in the Nordics, though we have customers from all over. For professional managed services, all the way from small web apps, to massive IPv4/IPv6 multi data center media hosting, and everything through container solutions, in-house, cloud, and data center, contact us at www.redpill-linpro.com.

If you are planning for an IPv6 only Data Center (and if you plan for the future, you are doing that) you may have noticed that there are applications out there that are just not ready for IPv6 yet. So you need some kind of 6-4 translation, either locally or in the network. From the Tayga wash label:

TAYGA is an out-of-kernel stateless NAT64 implementation for Linux that uses the TUN driver to exchange IPv4 and IPv6 packets with the kernel. It is intended to provide production-quality NAT64 service for networks where dedicated NAT64 hardware would be overkill.

Tayga is production quality software. We use it for ipv4 access for large amounts of production nodes every day. It is for example well suited for giving 6-to-4 network access for docker nodes. You may find more information about Tayga on it’s homepage: http://www.litech.org/tayga/

I pushed tayga-0.9.2-3 to Fedora 22 and 23 stable today. It will trickle down to your local mirrors in a couple of days. I have also forked tayga for epel5, epel6, and epel7. Please contribute by testing tayga for EPEL: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/?packages=tayga

Update: tayga is now available in EPEL
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Redpill Linpro is the market leader for professional Open Source and Free Software solutions in the Nordics, though we have customers from all over. For professional managed services, all the way from small web apps, to massive IPv4/IPv6 multi data center media hosting, and everything through container solutions, in-house, cloud, and data center, contact us at www.redpill-linpro.com.

I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s “canon”, that is, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion, every Christmas. So also this year.

Not much to post about The Hobbit this year, except that I also watched the extended edition of The Battle of the Five Armies some time ago. And I enjoyed it.

There are things to say about Peter Jackson’s Hobbit project, and I’ve actually already said a bit about the theater version. The extended edition, in plain 2D on a decent TV screen is a better film. There are things to dislike. How come Galadriel is the most powerful of the White Counsil? (Or is she?) The bunny sleigh is always annoying, and Legolas running up falling rocks is still a bit too disneyish for my taste. But hey, we also got more Beorn, more Esgaroth, and more Dale. That counterweights a lot. But what gave me most in this version, compared to the theater one, is the feeling of closure. We get Thorin, Fili and Kili’s funeral. Thorin has the Arkenstone on his breast, and Daín is crowned king. This is very satisfactory, and was reason enough for me to watch the movie.

I read Tolkien’s canon (The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings) every year about christmas. This year’s pondering is over Balin and Gandalf and Thrór’s ring.

Thrór possessed one of the seven rings that the dwarves got from Sauron of old. Inherited from father to son through generations, it was an heirloom of immense value for the Durin line. It passed to Thrain, who was Thrór’s son, and Thorin Oakenshield’s father. When Sauron woke again during the Third Age, Thrain was taken captive in Dol Guldur, and the ring taken from him. He perished there before Gandalf could resuce him. All this Gandalf told in the council of Elrond.

Now, by the same council, Glóin reveals that one of Balin’s main reasons for attempting to recolonize Moria, was to find Thrór’s ring. But Gandalf knew that it was not in Moria, as it was taken from Thrain in Dol Guldur. When Gandalf knew this, it is quite obvious that Thorin knew too. Gandalf would not keep information hidden about Thrain’s condition and death from his only son. So both Gandalf and Thorin must have known that Thrór’s ring was taken. Still, Balin, did not know, even though he was a close friend and companion of both Thorin and Gandalf. Consider the last scene in the Hobbit, where Gandalf and Balin, on a journey all the way from The Lonely Mountain, visit Bilbo. It is a meeting between close friends. Yet, Balin knew not. So he went with his followers to seek for the ring, and the whole colony was killed cruelly, fighting a last stand against the orcs of Moria.

In retrospect, a bit more openess about the ring would perhaps have been advisable. But the keeping and the keeper of the ring was constantly kept a tight secret in the Durin line. No one knew for sure who had the ring, until it was given to its next keeper. The appendices tell us that the dwarven rings were treacherous. Though not making the dwarves into shadows and slaves of Sauron, the ring keepers of the dwarves became jealous, and a constant hunger for more gold was set in them. Thus, the ring was often the base for a large hoard of treasure, which in turn could cause grieves like wars and dragon plunder.

Perhaps Gandalf considered this, when he kept his knowledge about Thrór’s ring hidden. It is still a bit of a mystery to me though.